A: Bonds have turned into a bad word with investors. Many have suspected a bond bubble was inflating, and now investors are finding out.

Investors yanked $43.8 billion from taxable-bond funds and $16.4 billion from municipal-bond funds in June, making the month the worst on record for bond fund outflow, says Morningstar.

There's a good explanation. A big reason many investors were in bonds was because they were hiding from the stock market. With the yield on the 10-year Treasury at 2.6%, owning Treasuries only made sense if investor just wanted to have some confidence they'd get their money back.

Whether or not to join the stampede out of bonds is a tougher decision. Rather than trying to time the bond market, and attempting to guess when to get in and out of the bond market, it's more helpful to think about your portfolio as a whole and decide how much of a portion should be in bonds.

Remember that bonds have been much less volatile than stocks, and even a bond crash pales next to a stock crash. For instance, the worst year for long-term government bonds in recent history was 2009, when they fell 14.9%. Compare that to the worst recent year for stocks, when the Standard & Poor's 500 fell 37% in 2008.